Second attempt at 40K MMO announced

Games Workshop is making a second attempt to get a Warhammer 40,000 MMO to market with the announcement of Eternal Crusade.

The project is aiming for a late 2015 release and is heading for PC, PS4 and Xbox One. It is being developed by Behaviour Interactive. Although it will be Behaviour's first MMO, the announcement press release states that the game is being worked on by 'MMO development veterans'.

The game will be played from a third-person over-the-shoulder perspective and will feature 'precision gunplay' and 'brutal melee combat'.

Players will be able to play as one of four of the most popular races in the tabletop game, the Space Marines, Chaos Space Marines, the Eldar or the Orks. There will also be the ability to pilot some of the distinctive vehicles in the Warhammer 40,000 universe including the Rhino, Predator and the Ork Battlewagon.

Each of the four factions will be fighting for control of large areas of territory, part of which will be procedurally generated. The MMO intends to feature simultaneous battles for thousands of players at a time.

This new ambitious-sounding Warhammer 40,000 MMO is part of a wider online strategy from Behaviour Interactive. The studio was also brought on board to help out on Chris Roberts' crowd funded space combat sim, Star Citizen last year.

A previous attempt to get a Warhammer 40,000 MMO out of the door fell apart with the Dark Millenium project that was being handled by THQ and Vigil Games. After a prolonged development cycle followed by the news that the game was being significantly reduced in terms of scope with multiplayer parts of the title being removed, Dark Millenium then disappeared completely when THQ declared bankruptcy and auctioned off its assets. Its whereabouts as a project are currently unknown.